Lesser of Two Evils

WE have been working on a project called CXL for a few weeks now.  In those few weeks we have shot some greenscreen footage for the film on the Panasonic hpx500.  The director Sean Gillane explains to me that this is more of a broadcast camera and not the best for Greenscreen extractions.  We decided to give it a try since our other option was a Canon 5D Mark ll.  The issue that this camera has when trying to pull a good key are the Red and Blue channels.  These channels have a tendency to be noisier than the Green channel.  Also you end with with this nice white line around the image that makes it really hard to key.  Check out my examples of these channels bellow.

           Red Channel             

      Blue Channel

The Canon 5D Mark Two  is a great camera and I love shooting with it.  To steal a phrase from Stu Maschwitz (his prolost blog is a must read) the 5D is an amazing Rebel camera, and it has done a lot for the VERY independent and not so independent film making community.  That being said it still has a lot of issue when shooting on Greenscreen.  the main issue is that its output is H264.  You end up with compressed footage that you have to try and get a key from.  Check out this alpha channel with a lose key pulled, you can see the compression ‘s square artifacts.  This will make pulling a key tougher, especially around the fine hair area.

 Nice chunk of compression

Compression causing the hair to crunch

In this photo you can see on the back of her hair that its starting to crunch.  This is due to the compression.  There are tricks around this of course but I would obviously prefer to use a better camera.  

Quick comp with crunched hair

One way around the compression issue would be to use a Aja Ki Pro mini.  We thought this was going to be our savior for our compression issue.  It bypasses the camera’s compression and you get  a nice ProRes 422(HQ) file.  The only problem was that it didn’t seem to work with the 5D.  We could only get a 29.97 FPS and no 1080p.   Major let down when we found out that we could not use the Aja Ki Pro Mini.  

We have one greenscreen shoot left and I still need to figure out if we should use the Panasonic hpx500 or the Canon 5D Mark ll.  I keep going back and forth with this one.  

Ill see some keying results with the hpx500 and say “Lets use this one on the next shoot” then I see some keying results with the %D and say the same thing. 

We are shooting in a few weeks and I am now leaning towards the 5D.  One major reason is because the plate for the GS shoot was shot on the 5D and thats really the only reason. 

If anyone has any suggestions feel free to post some comments!

Drew Struzan's Frankenstein!

I cannot wait for this to be sold!  I have read that it will be upward to 30 color screen print which Kevin Tong did the color separation for.  This also marks the first movie poster screen print from Drew Struzan so, this is gonna be some hot shit and will sell fast!  I can only hope I am lucky to get one.   Check out the amazing poster after the jump.

 

I love the idea of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are going to be archive film posters from Mondo.  They are archiving all posters that Mondo has been commissioning since 1999.

CXL

Before the big CXL shoot Sean was trying to prep everything he could and that included the greenscreen. He didn't have the time do the full screen so he only painted from just above the waste down, including the floor. With only half of the room being painted this created some concerns for myself as the Visual Effects Supervisor.  Its hard enough lighting a GS evenly, but its even harder to do so when it isn't painted evenly.

I will be posting some shots of the finished comps soon!

CXL

If you are unfamiliar with A Year Without Rent you should start reading Lucas McNelly’s blog.  The idea is he travels around the country helping out independent filmmakers on their films and they supply him with a couch to sleep on.

I am currently the visual effect supervisor on a film called CXL, which Lucas helped us out on for a few days.  He was a big help and a much needed extra hand for our small production.  Here is his take on his first day of the production.